Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c10.17

c10.17

It will be of interest now to study in brief the special features of these imitations of owls, some of which according to most numismatists were actually minted in the extreme north-west of India or just outside. The original 'owls' of Athens were beautifully executed silver coins of various denominations usually tetradrachms, which bore on the obverse the head of Pallas Athene, the tutelary deity of the city, and on the reverse the figure of an owl, the bird sacred to the goddess, with the legend AΘE usually in the right field. These coins were so much in demand among the people of the Aegean world and among those of the middle and near east, that Athens had to supply the specie from her own mint. When Athens lost her political importance as a result of her debacle in the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent Macedonian hegemony, her mint was closed, and imitations of the above type of the Athenian coins were made in large numbers in the countries which once used to import the Athenian originals. These imitations can be divided into two well-defined classes, the first closely approximating to its prototype. The second class softer in style usually bear the monogram M behind the head of Athene on the obverse and a bunch of grapes over the back of the bird on the reverse. The most characteristic feature which, however, distinguishes the second class from the first is that the obverse and reverse devices of the former are finely adjusted (↓ ↑), whereas in the case of the latter no such adjustment seems to have been made; this nice fixity of position of one die in relation to that of the other may point 'to the employment of a hinge or of some equally effective contrivance' (Macdonald). Moreover, the first class usually consists of tetradrachms, while the second also contains drachms and didrachms. These smaller denominations, again, are not based like the higher ones on the Attic standard of weight, a drachm according to which weighed 67.2 grains (4.37 grammes), but on one in which the same would weigh no more than 58 grains (3.75 grammes). These numismatic peculiarities of the second class of the imitations place them alongside ‘another set of drachms and diobols which are struck from regularly adjusted dies (↓ ↑), but in which the place of the Athenian owl is taken by an eagle, looking backwards’ (Macdonald). On this latter class of coins, the bunch of grapes behind the owl's back is in one case accompanied by a caduceus. These latter sets of the imitation of the Athenian ‘owls’ were undoubtedly the prototype of Sophytes’ coin discussed above, and this is one of the principal reasons which have led numismatists to infer that ‘at least the smaller Athenian imitations were not unfamiliar in the north of India’¹.